{"id":1764,"date":"2017-12-15T21:38:53","date_gmt":"2017-12-16T02:38:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=1764"},"modified":"2017-12-15T21:38:53","modified_gmt":"2017-12-16T02:38:53","slug":"pence-weinstein-phenomenon-contradictions-feminism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2017\/12\/pence-weinstein-phenomenon-contradictions-feminism.html","title":{"rendered":"The Pence-Weinstein Phenomenon and the Contradictions of Feminism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Time<\/em><\/a> has bestowed its \u201cPerson of the Year Award\u201d to \u201cthe silence breakers,\u201d i.e. those who, according to USA Today<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>\u201ctriggered a #MeToo national outcry over sexual harassment.\u201d<\/p>\n

This #MeToo campaign is quite a peculiar thing to behold.<\/p>\n

First, the vast majority of those men who have been accused of sexual improprieties tend to be left-leaning men, while their accusers appear to be \u201cprogressive\u201d or left-leaning women.\u00a0 Some of the accused and their accusers have explicitly, repeatedly put us on notice as to their politics.\u00a0 As for the others, given that dozens and dozens of these incidences and alleged incidences occurred in Hollywood<\/em>, it doesn\u2019t take a genius to infer the politics of those involved.<\/p>\n

Nor need we do much detective work to discover the political orientation of those famous media and Washington D.C. figures who have resigned their long-held positions because of allegations leveled against them.<\/p>\n

In short, this explosion of allegations of sexual abuse appears to be largely (if not solely) a left-wing thing.<\/p>\n

Second, this last point is relevant because, being \u201cprogressives\u201d or \u201cfeminists,\u201d both accuser and accused are, presumably, the absolutely last<\/em> people who we should expect to see caught up in a scandal of a sexual nature.<\/p>\n

After all, the men in question are left-liberals who, faithfully parroting the Feminist line that women are perpetual victims of patriarchal, misogynist oppression, style themselves champions of \u201cWomen\u2019s Rights\u201d and enemies of all things \u201csexist.\u201d<\/p>\n

The accusers, particularly many of those with higher-profiles, depict themselves as empowered, \u201cliberated\u201d women who in all respects\u2014physically, intellectually, emotionally, professionally\u2014are at least as<\/em> capable as their male counterparts (I am Woman.\u00a0 Hear me roar!<\/em>).<\/p>\n

To hear the way this cast of characters has been telling it for years, these men would never so much as think to harm women, and the women who traveled in their circles wouldn\u2019t let them if they tried.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s more: These men and women are one and the same men and women who for decades have spared no occasion to mock, ridicule, and, in some instances, demonize traditional sexual morality as\u2014what else?\u2014a species of bourgeoisie repression. The proponents of the old sexual mores they dismissed as prudes or, worse, \u201csexists.\u201d<\/p>\n

And it wasn\u2019t all that long ago when the self-appointed guardians of this politics of sexual liberation found as the poster boy for their bogeyman Vice-President Mike Pence.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Recall that Pence had said in an interview back in 2002 that he never dines alone with any woman (outside of female family members) other than his wife.\u00a0 When this interview resurfaced in March of this year, Pence was taken to task by feminists.<\/p>\n

Take, for example, Jia Tolentino of The New Yorker.\u00a0 <\/em>In \u201cMike Pence\u2019s Marriage and the Beliefs that keep Women from Power,\u201d<\/a> Tolentino wrote that Pence\u2019s ability to \u201crule out meals with a person of the opposite gender over the course of an entire career\u2026speaks to an incredible level of inequity in the workplace,\u201d for \u201cno successful woman could ever abide by the same rule.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tolentino, speaking in the standard leftist parlance of our time, attributes Pence\u2019s policy to \u201cgender essentialism,\u201d a belief\u2014deeply \u201centrenched\u201d in the minds of \u201cpeople of all political orientations, including women\u201d\u2014that \u201cwomen are sources of sexual danger [.]\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cavoid[ing] all women as a group and as a rule <\/em>because of the abstract possibility of sexual temptation,\u201d Pence is guilty of \u201csubscribing wholesale to an idea about gender that calcifies women as secondary,\u201d thus denying that women are \u201cfully human\u201d (emphasis original)[.]<\/p>\n

Tolentino, borrowing a line from Christian evangelicals, refers to Pence\u2019s policy as \u201cthe Billy Graham<\/a> rule.\u201d\u00a0 The world-renown Christian preacher\u2014at 99 years of age undoubtedly the most famous living representative of his kind\u2014made it a rule never to be alone in a room with any woman other than his wife.\u00a0 Graham was married for 64 years until his wife\u2019s death in 2005.\u00a0 Together they built a family of five children, 19 grandchildren, and numerous great-grandchildren.<\/p>\n

This, mind you, is the same Billy Graham who enjoys the distinction of having carried the Gospel over a career spanning six decades to more people than any other person in the history of Christianity, a man who served as a spiritual advisor to every American president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

This is the same white Southern Christian who repudiated Jim Crow, bailed Martin Luther King, Jr. out of jail, and invited the latter to join him at the pulpit during his New York City Revival meeting.<\/p>\n

Despite his many years in the public light, Graham never generated a scintilla of scandal or controversy, and his children continue to carry on their father\u2019s legacy by presiding over Christian charities that tirelessly help untold numbers of needy people around the world.<\/p>\n

This <\/em>is the man whose example Pence made it a point to follow.<\/p>\n

And feminists blasted<\/a> him and the Billy Graham rule as \u201csexist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, if Pence is \u201csexist\u201d for following Graham, then so too is Graham \u201csexist.\u201d So too is the admired Christian preacher Rick Warren, the Christian actor Kirk Cameron<\/a>, and, well, legions of other sensible, Christian men whose fidelity to their wives drives them to remove so much as the potential for trouble.<\/p>\n

Though there will always be Christian men (and women) who fail to live up to the standards of their faith, this doesn\u2019t change the fact that their faith, considered as a system of beliefs, does indeed have standards. Christianity offers its 2 billion living practitioners a worldview according to which sexual activity is permissible only within the bounds of monogamous (heterosexual) marriage.<\/p>\n

This belief isn\u2019t just moral<\/em> in character. Christian morality is inseparable from Christian ontology <\/em>or metaphysics, <\/em>i.e. its Big Picture of the world, of what\u2019s ultimately real.\u00a0 For the Christian, the cosmos is the handiwork of a personal Creator, a God who produced its crown jewel, humanity, from an endless and unconditional love. The Creation He endowed, not just with purposes, <\/em>but with meaning. <\/em><\/p>\n

The universe, in other words, has for the Christian a sacramental nature: It is a visible sign of God\u2019s invisible grace.<\/p>\n

Marriage is a sacrament.\u00a0 Marriage is not a contract<\/em>, but a covenant<\/em>, and though this covenant binds husband and wife, it binds them in God.\u00a0 <\/em>Husband and wife covenant with the source of their being as individuals and as a spiritual unity.\u00a0 Through the act of marriage, a constitutive change occurs and the two, in a fundamental, spiritual sense, become \u201cone flesh.\u201d<\/p>\n

To engage in sexual activity in any other context outside of marriage, then, is to treat oneself and one\u2019s partner as a \u201cmere means,\u201d as the great philosopher Immanuel Kant put it.\u00a0 If it\u2019s extramarital or non-marital, sex, even if consensual, requires that persons, or subjects,<\/em> regard themselves and others as objects<\/em>.\u00a0 The sex consists in the sexually active treating persons as instruments to the end of sexual gratification.<\/p>\n

To all of the details of this traditional Christian account of sexual morality even a contemporary Christian could take exception. Nor need any non-Christians accept it.\u00a0 The point, though, is that it is this vision of sexual morality that Christianity has promulgated for 2,000 years. As such, it has been the dominant sexual ethic of the Western world for nearly this same time period (until relatively recently).\u00a0 Far from degrading women, it has affirmed in both women and men an equal dignity, that which is \u201cabove all price,\u201d to quote Kant once again, for it refuses to reduce people to their bodies, to mere pleasure-maximizers.<\/p>\n

It is this vision of the world that gave rise to the so-called \u201cBilly Graham rule,\u201d a rule which generations of Christian men had been observing for centuries before Billy Graham.<\/p>\n

In blinding contrast, the worldview of contemporary feminists is grounded in a fundamental contradiction:<\/p>\n

Liberated women are as strong, savvy, and capable as men\u2014and they are the perpetual victims of male oppression, forever at the mercies of predatory men.<\/p>\n

That the self-contradictory root of feminism pervades the whole tree is made that much more obvious in light of what, for convenience\u2019s sake, we may call the Pence-Weinstein phenomenon:<\/p>\n

The Pences of the world are guilty of dehumanizing women insofar as they honor their wives by refusing<\/em> to place themselves in situations that could lead through illicit sexual relations to what they take to be the real degradation of women and themselves.<\/p>\n

So too are the Weinsteins of the world guilty of dehumanizing women by sexually harassing and assaulting women.<\/p>\n

Those men who cheat on their wives and sexually assault women are \u201csexist\u201d in doing so, but so too are those men who are faithful to their wives and refrain from doing anything that could so much as lead to the charge of sexual impropriety. Is this clear?<\/p>\n

Everything is \u201csexist.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if everything is \u201csexist,\u201d then nothing is \u201csexist.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Billy Graham rule looks wiser than ever in light of the #MeToo campaign, does it not?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Time has bestowed its \u201cPerson of the Year Award\u201d to \u201cthe silence breakers,\u201d i.e. those who, according to USA Today, \u201ctriggered a #MeToo national outcry over sexual harassment.\u201d This #MeToo campaign is quite a peculiar thing to behold. 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